Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Grandchildren Moon<\/p>\n
Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.\u00a0 Then stopped and put some pressure on.\u00a0 Then stroked some more.\u00a0 Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.\u00a0 She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.\u00a0 I’m feeling knot and kink free.\u00a0 Massage clears out the mind as well as the muscles.\u00a0 As Katie moved around my body, memories came flooding back.\u00a0 Mom’s hands on my neck when I had polio.\u00a0 The Alexandria 4-H county fair.\u00a0 That afternoon in Bangkok when I let a tiny Thai woman loose on my just ruptured achilles, not knowing what it was.\u00a0 Steel fingers and pain.\u00a0 Lots of pain.\u00a0 Then the night I stepped in the sewer grate while my body moved forward and my right foot stayed in place.\u00a0 Body memories, unlocked by Katie.<\/p>\n
Memories have a fluid, slippery existence, just like Katie’s hands as she followed the process of my spine from neck to tail.\u00a0 As I write about Mom and polio, an image of stuffing tissues into hardware cloth followed.\u00a0 The float for homecoming for my class, seniors at last.\u00a0 Being pulled away from that by who?\u00a0 I don’t recall.\u00a0 Then I was in Anderson, 9 miles away, at St. John’s hospital where my mother had been taken after collapsing while serving a funeral dinner.\u00a0 After that the sculpted green plastic and aluminum tubing of waiting room furniture at Riley Memorial in Indianapolis.\u00a0 Mom on a gurney, now 7 days after stroke, me riding with her as they took for an operation.\u00a0 She reached away from me and said, “Son.”\u00a0 The last words I heard from her.\u00a0 The painful early morning talk with my father, should we remove the life supports?\u00a0 Yes, we both decided.\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 Then the funeral.\u00a0 And the days and weeks and months after where I failed to integrate mom’s death as a powerful life lesson and instead took it as an emotional blast that rocked my very foundations.<\/p>\n
Bangkok, stumbling away from the 7-11 and the amulet stand in front of it, hurrying to get to the ATM.\u00a0 Traffic making me anxious, not careful.\u00a0 Blinding pain, yet running anyway because of the traffic, the cars.\u00a0 All the traffic and the cars.\u00a0 The night air humid as the flashing neon of Chinatown bathed the sidewalk in alternating colors, like the northern lights.<\/p>\n
As I know, we change our memories each time we access them, so all of these events, crucial as they are to my story, may not represent the truth at all, at least not the veridical, the actual truth.\u00a0 But, in a more important way, they are the most truthful of all since they are the truth that has shaped my response to all these things and the thousands more accreted over the years of my life so far.\u00a0 Even my account of the massage, who knows how close it is?\u00a0 Yet the feeling lingers.\u00a0 Good.\u00a0 Feeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lughnasa\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Grandchildren Moon Katie slipped her hands around my arm and stroked.\u00a0 Then stopped and put some pressure on.\u00a0 Then stroked some more.\u00a0 Katie was my birthday present from a thoughtful wife.\u00a0 She learned her trade from Sister Rosalind and the Sister’s school for massage.\u00a0 I’m feeling knot and kink free.\u00a0 Massage clears out … Continue reading Memorable<\/span>